The purpose of this article is to give an overview and start a discussion about economic changes Process Re-engineering. Many people think that they understand the meaning of the term “Business Process Re-engineering”, however, I have found that it has different meanings to different people. The general belief is that means lower costs. While this is certainly true that the end product, there are other major benefits that come as well. A major benefit is the AGILITY. The company will be able to respond much more quickly to the changed environment.
Companies are realizing that they need to change basic as they do business in order to maintain and grow the business. What many may not realize is that change is an activity that will continue over time. It should be viewed as a permanent activity of the company, just as important to success as a business, such as finance, sales and customer service. Change initiative should not be seen as just a quick fix to the current problem.
Currently, many companies perform Process Re engineering to achieve immediate savings and achieve short term profits they made. Feeling good about this performance, they go to another unrelated initiative only to find that in a year or two they face many of the same problems that they thought they had cleared up. Now they are facing take back staff, increased costs to correct issues that may easily have been identified and discussed without loss of customer satisfaction had they planned to continuously improve in the beginning.
The term “Customers” I mentioned above, not only external customers, but also internal customers, those people who make the business work effectively. When As part of the normal working day, problems have arisen that are beyond the capability of existing processes or applications to bypass think of and put into place. Usually meant as a temporary solution, these “fixes” undocumented and tend to become part of normal life. This offers the possibility to lose a piece of the process and generally leads to erroneous assumptions. The result of this will not be to achieve maximum performance and savings.
What is Business Process Re engineering?
Business Process Re engineering (BPR) is a comprehensive process requiring a change in the fundamental business processes are made. BPR identified unnecessary or redundant activities and eliminate them. Wherever possible that it includes guide means and their automation. To succeed, it needs to have a thorough and complete understanding of the current processes. Using this in-depth knowledge allows for analysis of how best to implement every piece of the process, however, the constant focus on customer satisfaction.
What is necessary for success?
To effectively implement BPR, traditional thinking and management must give way to have power leadership and thinking “outside the box”. Exchange of information at all levels of the organization is necessary. It begins with the implementation of goals and objectives for each process, defining the roles and outline common approaches. This step is critical to the success of the BPR initiative. Management must eliminate departmental mandate, exempting initiative from departmental budgets and remove strict operational. This is counter-productive to BPR projects.
The next step is empowerment, allowing employees to have a say in how the business will work efficiently. To ensure that this happens, senior management will agree to stick to a few points. The most important commitment: provide support and impetus for the initiative. Once started, they can not look back, this will probably be the most difficult obstacle management will land. Employees must see and understand that management supports the participation and approval of changes must be made. Management can not ignore the recommendations, even those who think they are frivolous, and will give positive feedback to encourage continued participation and success.
Next executives must understand that there will be time commitments involved, both for themselves and for the staff. They must be willing to share some of their time with the staff to make the process of investigation and mapping, for not only are the daily activities of the business examined and mapped, and management functions as well. If there is truly a commitment to improving the overall functionality of the company, then no area can be left unmapped.
The mapping may be that redundancies can be eliminated immediately with little or no effort. Usually, these unnecessary operations manual efforts of some kind, two people come to the same data, identify problems and adjustments for the same customers or other such forms of work. Change the process map and updated to reflect the new approach. These changes are quick clicks provide instant payback. The making excess work can be dissolved tom do other things, increase their productivity and start moving towards agility.
Each person should be sure he or she has ownership of the initiative. Entrepreneurial spirit should be created for the organization. A fair amount of time and effort needs to be devoted to the implementation of this approach, but immediately attitudes and ideas entrenched. As team members take ownership of the process, a sense of pride will be the driving force in their performance. There is always a fundamental desire to contribute and make a difference and it is extremely important for organizational leaders to recognize the achievements of individuals and take time to celebrate them.
Many projects involved in Business Change. The first step toward success is planning and empowerment. Balance projects with successful BPR implementation requires a fair amount of strategic thinking and planning. Positive attitude, thought process, avoid the temptation of quick savings by eliminating staff, and stay focused and on task, are the heart of the process and can be difficult. Remember, these are important features of successful change in operation.
Copyright 2007 William Wood